Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby and Python web applications. It has a strong focus on ease of use, stability and performance. Phusion Passenger is built on top of tried-and-true, battle-hardened Unix technologies, yet at the same time introduces innovations not found in most traditional Unix servers. Since mid-2012, it aims to be the ultimate polyglot application server.

Hi readers, thanks so much for your patience. In the past week since we had started announcing Phusion Passenger Enterprise (see Roadmap Preview 1, Preview 2 and Preview 3) we’ve received inquiries and fan mail alike. Some of you had questions and we had to keep you waiting. But today we are proud to release Phusion Passenger Enterprise to the world.

Just the beginning

The features we’ve announced so far are just the beginning. In the near future we shall be unveiling even more Phusion Passenger Enterprise features, some of which may surprise people. These features will be part of the Phusion Passenger Enterprise 4.0 release. The current release is 3.0.x, with 4.0 beta coming up in the near future, as you can see in our roadmap.

We’d love to hear your feedback on Phusion Passenger Enterprise. Please email us or leave a comment at Hacker News or in this blog.

Curious about what those new features are? Enter your email address and name and we’ll keep you up to date about all Phusion news.

Would ask you to consider offering your ‘startup’ rate to registered non-profits too. Being a non-profit can be just as cash-strapped as being a startup. It makes you appear to have odd values to offer discounts to startups who don’t have a lot of money now but plan to have millions, and not to non-profits who never plan to have a lot of money in order to serve a social good.

Hey Jonathan. It wasn’t our intention to exclude non-profits, we just expected Phusion Passenger Enterprise to be mostly used by for-profit businesses. But we shall consider licensing types for non-profits, students and educational institutions.

@Ursel: The open source version will continue to exist alongside Phusion Passenger Enterprise. By buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise, you will be directly supporting the development of the open source version of Phusion Passenger.

Stefan Haubold

If I get this right there is an passenger gem and an enterprise passenger gem right now. Will this stay this way? Or will there be a single gem in the future?

I’m asking because we are using EngineYard right now. Two gems means much more work as we either need to wait for EY to integrate both versions or install and update the enterprise gem + compile nginx manually. A nicer integration would be if there was only 1 gem and putting the license file onto the server enables the enterprise features. Any chance for this with a future update?

@Stefan: Phusion Passenger (open source) and Phusion Passenger Enterprise will continue to be two distinct products. Phusion Passenger Enterprise will continue to have more features than the open source Phusion Passenger. Each product will have its own gem.

It would indeed be convenient to have a single codebase that can do everything, with the license key enabling certain features. However due to the open source nature of Phusion Passenger and the commercial nature of Phusion Passenger Enterprise, it is not possible to do this.

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